11/02/2005

It Must Suck To Be a Republican Senator Today:Goddamn, just take a gander at the faces of Bill Frist and Lil' Ricky Santorum as Frist raged about Minority Leader Harry Reid's invocation of a rule that demanded a closed-door session of the Senate yesterday. Frist has the look of a man who has just been kicked in the nuts, who has been bitch-slapped by an angry pimp, who has been told that someone took his favorite stool at the bar. And Lil' Ricky's just standin' there with the sad-puppy look of someone who knows he's gonna fuckin' lose his seat. Meanwhile, the malevolent Trent Lott oozes in the background, wondering if he should twist Reid's shiv in Frist's ribs. Don't you just sport wood or get all gooey wet listenin' to Frist attempt to re-attach his ballsack like the good surgeon he is?

In many, many ways, it's gotta fuckin' suck to be part of the majority right now, especially in the Senate. 'Cause, see, the Republicans have nearly all the power, and many, many of the people who put them there a year ago are now sittin' up and thinkin', "What the fuck?" Because with the war bein' a snowball rollin' down a clear mountain, with the cave to the religious right on the Supreme Court, with the indictment of Scooter, with the surfacing into the mainstream media of the slime-covered Peter Lorre-like visage of Karl Rove, with this and so, so much else, the American public is, more and more, asking, "Ummm, what are you hiding? And why are you trying so fuckin' hard to hide it?" Or perhaps, "What are you Republicans afraid of?"

There's unequivocal statements conflicting with reality here. If the President says he'll get rid of anyone in the White House "who had anything to do" with the leak of a covert CIA agent's name, and then he doesn't fire someone who admitted that he leaked the name, that doesn't really leave much wriggle room, right? If the President says that, without a doubt, Saddam Hussein has WMDs and then we learn that, without a doubt, he didn't, that bears some investigation, no? You're either a man of your word or you're just a fuckin' liar, and that simple choice and its simple answer has now bled through to the public at large.

As any good mob enforcer who's dropped a squealer in cement shoes into the Narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn knows, eventually the ropes or chains holding onto them will rot or rust away, the flesh will decay and loosen from the bucket, and what you want to stay hidden will surface. The question is how much distance, in time and space, can you put between you and that bobbing corpse. And what Harry Reid and Dick Durbin did yesterday was to pull the car over and force the Republicans to at least admit that there's something missing.

'Cause - and what really sucks about being Republican right now - crime is crime and lies are lies, no matter which party is in power. Republicans in Congress have been trapped by the Bush administration: if they really begin to look at how we got into the Iraq war, they're gonna alienate the White House, which will turn on them with a viciousness generally ascribed to starving hyenas finding a wounded antelope; but if they don't have hearings, and have them soon, the public will remember this in 2006 and hasta la vista. (And if you're a moderate Republican, the intensity is doubled when it comes to a Supreme Court nominee who your own constituents wouldn't want you to support.) One doesn't have to have complete faith in the citizens of this country to believe that, since Katrina, since 2000 dead, attention is being paid in a way that one wishes it had been, say, a year ago.

So when Bill Frist huffed and puffed to the microphones yesterday, declaring the Democrats' action as a "stunt" (which, of course, raised the question, "And the Terri Schivo vote was what now?"), what we got to witness was the thrashings about of the trapped man, the pinned moth fluttering desperately, the idiot lost in the maze that he himself helped construct.